Bahamian Bandwagon NFL Fans (that we hate)

Bahamians, like all other sensible people in the world watch NFL football, quite a bit if you were to believe what you see in sports bars between September and February of every single year. The thing about living on our archipelago is that we don’t have any set NFL team to root for.

While our neighbors to the north may see not having an NFL team as a disadvantage my compatriots see it as a gift. Not having an NFL team allows them to pull for whoever the hell they want to pull for. We’re pretty much a country of bandwagoners, and it’s annoying as hell.

Just about every team is accounted for among Bahamian NFL fans but there are a few teams in particular that Bahamians love more than others. So here are the various groups of bandwagon NFL fans that live in The Bahamas.

Superbowl Front Runners : The worst people in the world

“I loved Peyton Manning ever since he joined the Broncos”

This person is a black eye on the face of humanity, human pond scum, the worst of what society has to offer. The Bahamas geography allows for us to pull for anyone we want, but these people take this freedom to its most destructive conclusion.

These people are usually folks that don’t watch or really care for football at all, yet, somehow they find themselves in front of the TV at your Superbowl party hogging all the chicken wings yelling profusely that “I always knew that Von Miller was going to be special” when an hour ago they didn’t even know that Von Miller was a football player and not the preacher with the raspy voice they used to hear on ZNS 1240 AM.

“I know he could do it, I usta listen to him preachin on da radio”

Fuck these people.

Fantasy Football Guy – Always happy to ruin your Sunday

These guys make for great comedy but shitty company

While not as galling as Superbowl front runner person this person becomes borderline intolerable if you’re watching a game where you’re actually concerned with the outcome. It’s one thing to be actively rooting hard for a team because you… I don’t know, like that team, it’s another thing completely to root against a team because you’re down 10 points in your league and Karlos Williams is on your team and he totes needs to have a big game to make up the deficit.

To all you would-be Matthew Berrys out there, a few thoughts to consider:

nobody gives a shit, and also:

shut the fuck up

I have to do 10 different types of Buhddist prayers and clutch beads not to hit these assholes across the head with a chair.

Bahamian patriots fans are some of the worst people you can hope to meet in life. At one point they were Superbowl front runners not really concerned with the particulars of the sport until January came along, but at some point in the mid 2000s they got smart.

The NFL’s salary cap all but insures that no team could be consistently good, but the Patriots stumbled onto a cheat code that broke that formula. As a result they’re one of the few teams always consistently in the hunt for a Superbowl.

Their assbag bandwagon fans figured that out too and decided they’d root for these guys as well because they’ll always be good as long as Belichick’s Sith apprentice Tom Brady doesn’t go rogue and throw him down an atrium in the Death Star Gillette Stadium into the vacuum of outer space parking lot.

I mean look at these guys

Don’t get it twisted, these clowns still don’t know much about football or this team for that matter, they don’t really care either. They can’t tell you who the hell Deion Branch or Willie McGinest is, or the difference between a slant or a post route, but you bet your ass whenever the team finds itself embroiled in their next cheating scandal (and knowing the Patriots they’ll be in another one sooner rather than later), their fans will be on Social media writing short stories in all caps describing anyone who characterizes a team that was busted for cheating MULTIPLE times as “haters” and “losers” while imploring them to “look at the rings”.

Patriots fans: we don’t hate you because we aren’t you,we’re actually thankful for that, we hate you because you’re jerks.

These people are to football what Donald Trump is to politics. They don’t know anything about it, they’re not interested in learning about anything about it, and they stumbled ass-backwards into a good thing and they believe in their utterly frozen hearts that it makes them smarter than everyone else somehow.

They’re people who rooted for a serial killer and they don’t feel any kind of way about it.

A long, long LONG time ago before you were born the Dallas Cowboys were a great team, they even won the Superbowl…. three times in a four year span actually. During that time they picked up a ton of fans like Superbowl front runner guy and Patriots guy; fans who thought they had stumbled onto a team that they could root for and look smart doing it because they would be good forever. You know what happened after that?

These guys exhausted the world’s supply of hookers and cocaine?

Nothing (hookers and cocaine notwithstanding). Absolutely nothing.

Since 1995 the Cowboys have been the same disgrace you see this current day on the football field, somehow these people are still here, just as loud as Patriots guy and as annoying as fantasy football guy, serving as a walking catalog for all the stupid things that their perv owner/GM/creepy old man Jerry Jones does.

In that 21 year span the Cowboys have always managed to find a distraction or two to pull the wool over their idiot fans’ eyes, they’d sign Terell Owens, or draft Dez Bryant, or break Rolando McClain out of jail to play football in some Suicide Squad kind of arrangement. Every year these idiot fans would make so much noise because they really believe that this mess of a team had a chance to win a Superbowl. “If we would just draft (insert overhyped college player’s name here) and sign (insert about to be drastically overpaid player’s name here) we should be back in the Superbowl!”

Every season would come down to either a paltry regular season record or a loss in a playoff game that nobody expected them to win in the first place because they aren’t that good.

Here’s my wakeup call to Cowboys fans: 1995 is over. Your team has been a mess ever since and it won’t be good as long as your owner/GM/president/circus master is an octogenarian suffering from dementia and your quarterback, who was the one great player you have, died last week. Stop bothering us.

These are folks who remember when the Pittsburgh Steelers were an imposing force in football. The 1970’s “Steel Curtain” football teams won an utterly ridiculous four Superbowls that decade, FOUR! They outright owned that decade, and these jerks, who were probably Superbowl front runner guy in the 70s found a bandwagon to hop on for all eternity.

Unfortunately for these people, and fortunately for the rest of us, they had to be quiet for almost three decades when the Steelers decided to not do shit. All throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s we never heard a peep from these people. They went from afros to bald heads, grew beer bellies, moved to the suburbs, had kids and then grand kids and lived lowkey lives, bringing up Jerome Bettis, Terry Bradshaw or the immaculate reception every now and then, which is cool because Bradshaw and Bettis are cool as hell, and so was the immaculate reception.

But outside of that they didn’t say shit…. for three entire decades.

Then something awful happened.

In 2006 the Steelers rookie quarterback from Miami University of Ohio didn’t completely ruin guided the team to a Superbowl victory, he then did the same thing a few years later as a more developed and complete player, and just like that bandwagon Steelers fans had to dust off their Mean Joe Greene jerseys and figure out who the fuck Troy Polamalu is.

The Steelers haven’t made a Superbowl run since 2009 but they’ve been a consistently good team. Which means their bandwagoners are in full effect after nearly three decades of being dormant football fans. Their grandkids wish they would stop trying to defend Ben Rothelisberger every time he gets busted for rape.

I wish the Heinz Field scene from The Dark Knight Rises really happened at a Steelers game so our annoying aunts and uncles could be silenced once and for all.

Then they have my permission to die

Giants fans: The Dumbest of the bunch

Full disclosure: I’m a devout Giants fan.

Also full disclosure: I’m stupid as rocks.

We’re all stupid assholes.

For some reason we root for a team that isn’t any fucking good, and hasn’t been any good since we were in the first grade, but we think we’re such savvy knowledgeable football fans because our stupidity has been rewarded not once, but TWICE with Superbowl victories.

Giants teams with trash records have beaten two of the most perfect football teams ever assembled twice in a four year span and we walk around holding it over Patriots fans’ head like being stupid enough to pull for this garbage team is an accomplishment.

And the end is nowhere in sight, our best defensive player turned his right hand into confetti playing with fireworks on independence day like a stupid 12 year old, our second best receiver’s hamstring would explode if he tried to take a shit, our best player since Laurence Taylor spent the whole summer rooming with Drake which probably means that his play this season will be as mediocre and disappointing as “Views”. Our quarterback is Eli “The Much Less Talented Brother” Manning.

We’re dumb, smug assholes. Our team lost about 7 games we had no right to last year and somehow we still believed until the end of the season that we’ll go 7-9 and stumble back-asswards into a Superbowl again because if it happened twice why can’t it happen again? When we should be asking “Why should it happen again?”

We can’t beat the Washington Racial slurs and all their bad karma, we choked a game to Tony Romo the week before his shoulder got shattered into a million pieces, we can’t beat the Jets, who are the fucking JETS, our owner defended not cutting a kicker who allegedly beat his wife up daily, a KICKER. They cut kickers for sitting in the wrong seat on the team charters!

We don’t deserve to win the Superbowl.

We don’t deserve anything good in life.

Miami/Nassau Dolphins fans: More confusing than annoying

The Dolphins may be the most popular NFL team in The Bahamas.

I don’t understand why.

Yes Miami is the closest NFL city to the Bahamas both geographically and culturally leaving one to believe that Miami would be the natural choice for most Bahamians to root for, but this doesn’t make any sense because Bahamians, for the most part, hold allegiance to no other Miami sports teams whatsoever.

Sure some of my people rooted for The Heat when Lebron did his 4 year stint there, but I saw those same people become Cavs fans in the space of however long it took to read the headline of Lebron’s ghostwritten PR stuntstatement announcing his departure from Miami. Bahamians can’t tell you who Eric Spoelstra or Giancarlo Stanton is, but they love the Dolphins so goddamn much and it’s so confusing.

Bahamian people’s love for the Dolphins transcends racial and class lines. You could put big-shirt wearing dudes named Wado from Ida street in a room with die-hard Long Island-really believe they’re white-Conchy Joes who would stage an armed insurrection if their kids went to the same school as Wado’s, and they’d find common ground in their love for The Dolphins.

I don’t find the Bahamian Dolphins fanbase as annoying as the others because it’s something you take for granted growing up in The Bahamas; When antenna TVs were still a thing we picked up local Miami stations, I read the Miami Herald everyday as a child, South Florida is a 15 minute flight away and a great deal of Bahamians have family and friends who reside in there. Growing up here in the pre-internet era you would know everything there is to know about the Dolphins. The love for the Dolphins isn’t the confusing thing so much as the indifference Bahamians have for everything else South Florida outside of Sawgrass Mills and IHop.

Bahamians generally tend to be a fickle, front running bunch and it’s not like the Dolphins have been any good for most of the last 20 years, further adding to my confusion for the team’s loyal following in The Bahamas.

I genuinely don’t get it but it’s not something I think of very often.

The Dolphins will be on their way to another 8-8 season in no time and I can forget about them like I do every year.